Some UK email marketing stats

don't assume that everything top-flight companies do with their e-mail marketing has been as carefully thought out and tested to make sure it works.

Taking advantage of the inherent benefits of transactional e-mail — high deliverability and click-through rates — just makes marketing sense. If you take care to keep the intent of the message true to its original purpose, transactional e-mail can be

Only one in every 28 e-mail messages sent to business addresses was legitimate; the rest were unsolicited, according to a new report.

"...while I admit that the Open Rate has its limitations, I still believe its one of the most easily accessible, actionable and dare I say - meaningful metrics for email deliverability available."

Newsflash: The text message is back! Actually, it never went away, but email marketers left it behind as HTML email–with images, colors, fonts, tables, columns and embedded links–became more accessible and productive.

Make sure your designers are experienced in producing creative for the inbox, including the fast-emerging mobile platforms. Emails require vastly different approaches than designing for print and even the Web.

If you don't write a clear, concise brief that states the email message's goal to be conveyed through the creative design, the individual elements(subject line, headline, images, copy and layout) can end up fighting each other for the reader's attention.

As email marketers, we never know what mindset email recipients will be in at any given time. So a good idea is to design your copy and creative to speak to all personality types/buying modalities: competitive, spontaneous, methodical and humanistic.